I really like this story and hope I could give it a try myself someday. Not sure if I'd go to to Siberia though, instead, I'd like to stay in a small cabin by the ocean somewhere in Iceland.

After 20 years of journeying around the world, travel writer Sylvain Tesson decided he wanted to stay put and fulfill his dream of "living as a hermit." Not one to do things by halves, he spent six months alone in a cabin on the edge of Lake Baikal in Siberia, 75 miles from the nearest village. He took books, cigars and vodka -- and discovered space, silence, and solitude

I wanted to experiment with the simple life and claim back time. I wanted to feel life, and understand how it would look just contemplating the landscape, rather than harvesting kilometres on the road as I was used to when travelling.

If I had not had books, I would have gone quickly mad. A book is a way to have someone with you. For the first time in my life I was able to read a whole book, beginning to end without stopping, sometimes reading for eight hours straight.

Boredom didn't frighten me. There are worse pangs: the sorrow of not sharing with a loved one the beauty of lived moments. Solitude: what others miss out on by not being with the person who experiences it.

Time is the most precious treasure we have. We all have 24 hours a day, but we are all destroying this treasure, especially with electronics. Always being contactable is the beginning of your loss of freedom. It is what we ask of prisoners ; it's like an electronic tag. There is always the intrusion of people into your time and it is horrible.